The executives and producers. There’s a fascinating leaked email thread from Marvel where a couple random execs are hyping up each other’s terrible ideas, saying they could kill off characters and reboot Iron Man and other self-indulgent nonsense. Then Kevin Feige, all hail and hallowed be his name, joins the thread with a simple sentence - “We don’t need to reboot, we can make infinite stories in these universes.” With a stroke of the keyboard he stopped that garbage in its tracks.

There’s also a great speech by Kevin Smith where he describes being hired to write Superman and he goes to the producer’s house to read the script. The guy is coked out, ranting about how there needs to be action every 10 pages in the script or the audience will get bored. He’s talking about spiders and says the main villain should be one. Then Smith says Superman’s kryptonian name, “Kel’al” or whatever, and the guy is like, who?

That’s the people making these calls sometimes. Most companies do not have a Kevin Feige.

Amazon especially is going to be an overly cautious and bureaucratic behemoth. Inexperienced as a whole despite whoever they hired. Meanwhile HBO just bought a Channel 5 documentary produced by Tim and Eric and A24 with total creative freedom. Risky. That’s the difference between shills and artists.